DataViz Roundup — April 8, 2026
The inaugural issue of the newsletter from DataViz Dojo.
Hello and welcome to our DataViz Dojo Newsletter!
We’re still experimenting with the format, but the general idea is to send a roundup once every other week, let’s say, on Wednesdays. It would spotlight the stuff we posted since the last send plus any other things we think you’d find interesting.
We believe it’s a good alternative to pushing every single article at you the minute it is posted, but just in case you disagree, we have a tiny little reader poll here:
Anyway, here’s what our team has cooked up in the last couple of weeks.
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The Best Statistical Graphic Ever Created
There’s this legendary data visualization from 1869 that maps out Napoleon’s disastrous march into Russia — troop size, location, direction, temperature, time, and casualties all packed into one graphic. Edward Tufte basically crowned it the greatest statistical chart ever made.
We stumbled across an old gravure of Napoleon crossing the Neman River (or Nemunas as we call it here), which is right where the chart kicks off, and figured why not try rebuilding the whole thing with amCharts and a bit of help from Claude. Took about five hours. It’s a fun look at how a 150-year-old visualization still absolutely holds up.
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Five Prompts to an Animated Globe
We took a spinning globe with flight paths, animated planes, and a live mileage counter from zero to done in five plain-English prompts. The trick was hooking up the amCharts MCP server so the AI could actually look stuff up in the docs instead of guessing — turns out an AI with a reference and an AI without one are basically different tools. Each prompt layered on more polish: city markers, dashed routes, altitude effects, fading labels, even a little plane shadow. Five sentences, one pretty slick globe.
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Sankey Diagrams Weren’t Invented by Sankey
Sankey diagrams? Not actually invented by Sankey. Turns out a British Army lieutenant named Harness was drawing flow maps back in 1838 but anyone hardly noticed. Then Minard (the Napoleon chart guy) spent decades making gorgeous geographic flow maps. Sankey showed up last in 1898 with a steam engine diagram and somehow got his name slapped on the whole thing.
History lessons aside, the article concludes with practical advise on how this type of visualization is now readily buildable using a modern charting library.
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Not All SVG Maps Are Created Equal
Most SVG maps floating around out there have the same problems — Mercator making everything near the poles look massive, Atlantic-centered views that awkwardly split the Pacific in half, and files bloated with thousands of coordinate points nobody needs.
Long story short, we built a free SVG Map Generator that lets you pick from 90+ projections, drag the map to center it however you want, and simplify the geometry down to a fraction of the file size without it looking janky.
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In other news…
We gave VisitedPlaces.com a proper makeover. It’s one of our most popular tools, used by thousands to create their travel stories as static images, interactive embeds, or animated videos. The new version features a refined, intuitive user interface and a dramatically speedier video generator.
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DataViz Dojo was created by amCharts team. We’re not here to peddle you our data-viz lib. We’re here to have fun with facts, data, cartography, and history, blending it all into beautiful visual stories. Subscribe, follow, or simply check in regularly for more compelling stuff!